On
June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers—a 21-year-old black
Mississippian, James Chaney,
and two white New Yorkers, Andrew
Goodman, 20, and Michael
Schwerner, 24—were murdered near Philadelphia, in Nashoba County,
Mississippi. They had been working to register black voters in Mississippi
during Freedom Summer and had gone to investigate the burning of a black church.
They were arrested by the police on trumped-up charges, imprisoned for several
hours, and then released after dark into the hands of the Ku Klux Klan,
who beat and murdered them. It was later
proven in court that a conspiracy existed between members of Neshoba County's
law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan to kill them.

Dr. King holds FBI poster of missing CORE workers

The FBI arrested 18 men in October 1964, but
state prosecutors refused to try the case, claiming lack of evidence. The
federal government then stepped in, and the FBI arrested 18 in connection with
the killings. In 1967, seven men were
convicted on federal conspiracy charges and given sentences of three to ten
years, but none served more than six. No one was tried on the charge or murder.
The contemptible words of the presiding federal judge, William Cox, give an
indication of Mississippi's version of justice at the time: "They killed one ni---r,
one Jew, and a white man. I gave them all what I thought they deserved." Another
eight defendants were acquitted by their all-white juries, and another three
ended in mistrials. One of those mistrials freed Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen—believed
to be the ringleader—after the jury in his case was deadlocked by one member who
said she couldn't bear to convict a preacher (Click here for analysis of the "Mississippi
Burning" Trial).

10 of the co-conspirators who were arrested in
connection with the murders.

On
Jan. 7, 2005, four decades after the crime, Edgar Ray Killen,
then 80, was charged with three counts of murder. He was accused of
orchestrating the killings and assembling the mob that killed the three men. On
June 21—the 41st anniversary of the murders—Killen was convicted on three counts
of manslaughter, a lesser charge. He received the maximum sentence, 60 years in
prison. The grand jury declined to call for the arrest of the seven other living
members of the original group of 18 suspects arrested in 1967.

A major reason the case was reopened was a 1999
interview with Sam Bowers, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard convicted in 1967
of giving the order to have Michael Schwerner killed. Bowers remarked in the
interview that took place more than 30 years after the crime, "I was quite
delighted to be convicted and have the main instigator of the entire affair walk
out of the courtroom a free man. Everybody, including the trial judge and the
prosecutors and everybody else, knows that that happened." Bowers claims that
Killen was a central figure in the murders and organized the KKK mob that
carried them out. (Bowers is currently serving a life sentence for ordering a
1966 firebombing in Hattiesburg, Miss., that killed Vernon Dahmer, a Mississippi
civil rights leader—another crime that took decades to successfully prosecute).